It should come as no surprise that we’re fans of the Roku box; our updated Roku channel is my personal favorite recent VideoBox enhancement. If you haven’t tried Roku porno yet, we’ll have some fun news for you in the near future that we hope will make that much easier for you. But while you wait for more details on that, there’s a Roku announcement from CNET that the VB team thought was pretty cool:

Roku’s “streaming stick” is coming out in October for $99. It packs all the punch of a Roku box into a little USB stick that plugs into TVs and is instantly out of sight, out of mind. Rest assured we’ll be playing with one in the VB office as soon as we can get our hands on it!

Roku also has a mobile app that we enjoy. It allows you to use your device as a remote (oh-so-handy when typing searches or logging in for the first time). According to the same CNET article, an update to the Roku app enables AirPlay-like streaming of music and photos from your device to your TV. Whether you’re streaming porn or looking at vacation photos with your kids (because you’ve installed our discreet app and enabled the parental access controls, right?), this sounds like another great reason to have a Roku in your house.

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on Friday, September 21st, 2012 at 5:54 pm and is filed under announcements, geekery, technology.
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30 Responses to “Roku Porn, Stick & Mobile”

What about your own site changes today? Why not announce and explain them instead of announcing some other companies new stuff that isn’t even available yet.

Why are you trying to bury all news about updates to your site? You don’t want to have the new content posted on the home page, you don’t want the new ‘features’ posted on the blog. What’s up with that.

I find it troubling that you aren’t excited about the new content you are adding to the site, and trumpeting it from the highest mountain.
I find it troubling that you aren’t adding features to your site that you can’t wait to share with your customers.

Instead we get, “yeah, yeah, we are adding new stuff, but look isn’t our old stuff really exciting” that just says hey, we used to get good stuff but its gonna be pure crap from here on put.

would be good if you could add the ability in our accounts to change payment methods to allow PayPal and perhaps VISA and also allow us to make one-time payments for 6-month or 12-month rate (thru Meta-Billing, PayPal, or VISA) to our subscriptions while keeping our current accounts. Is this possible?

Hey everyone, I already said basically this on the “MP4 Fix” post, but this seems like a good place to say it as well:

Let’s keep the comments on this post relevant to the post itself. If anyone has further questions regarding the home page layout, or support needs, the best way for you to get issues resolved is to submit the feedback form at http://www.videobox.com/support/contact. I say this not as a misdirection, but because when you submit via that form, a bunch of debugging info gets attached to the email we receive, which narrows down the investigation for us and speeds up response times. We also have staff ready to respond to those emails during normal business hours, whereas the blog is more a loosely-monitored, “when we have time” sort of thing. I hope this helps!

@1234, your comment is a good one to submit via the form, so we can look up your account info and see if there is a way to get things set up the way you want. Everyone else, we read your feedback regarding the home page, and you are not being ignored or disregarded; we are taking all the feedback we receive from various sources into consideration as we plan our work for the rest of 2012.

And as for the topic of this post: do any of you use the Roku app, or are you considering giving it a try? Does a Roku stick seem like a cool idea, or would you rather have the box?

I have a Roku, but I also have a PC connected to my TV with a wireless mouse and keyboard. Tried the Videobox app briefly, then went back to the full site browser-based experience, which is still preferable for content discovery. The Roku app does give quick access to the newest releases though, at least for now.

@Egg : I just checked my Roku again. I think they saw my comment and did a stealth update. The newest HD movies used to be the first thing you’d see when going into browse, but you could hit the down button a couple times to see all of the new movies. Now it starts with “Recently Popular HD” movies. Both sections for newest movies are missing.

It’s still only 2 clicks to get to newest on the website (Movies button > Newest to Oldest) so the website wins over Roku.

We like Roku – very easy to use and saves us a lot of money especially since we cancelled our cable TV. The savings from the first month we cut the cable paid for the Roku.

We will not buy the new Roku Stick nor would we recommend it because it does not have a USB port. We often use the USB port to play our own content (movies, music, pics) without having to fire up a computer attached to the TV.

However, Roku is not the best way to “discover content” or manage a queue (stash) – this goes for Netflix as well as VideoBox. Searching on Roku is tedious and seems to yield incomplete results. So we manage our queues with a computer then use Roku to play the content on the TV.

What does members complaining about new releases not being shown on the main page have to do with technical support?

This change makes no sense; it raises concerns that you are all the sudden de-emphasizing the new content, considering the selling point of this site is “5 new releases every day!” Yeah, I get it, if you click a couple of times you can find the new content, but why do I have to go through all that when you could have maintained the way it was and then added, right below it, the “personalized recommendations.” I mean, you guys were able to do it with those ridiculous fake web cams (and why am I exposed to that after paying a subscription fee anyway?) so what gives?

Design changes should be vetted before the paying audience before being rolled out. Did anyone really think we wouldn’t notice that you are not posting the newest videos to the front page? That was the selling point of this site! Five new movies a day!
This isn’t a tech support issue, this is a major design change that is attempting push through with out any notice.
What your doing IS a misdirection attempt, this issue affects all users as it is a SITE design change on the front page non the less.
New content is not delivered to the front page, which once again was a major selling point. Feels like we are getting ready for a hoodwink.
And companies wonder why we turn to torrents.

even tho i am a videobox fan, particulary on roku.I must say the “new” changes made to the site are effecting roku use as well.It seems as though we are losing some of our basic functionality with roku as well. just alot less to choose from, with this new app,,,,

as has been said before, i have to manage my stash on my computer and wait for the changes to be updated on the roku app (which sometimes takes up to a few hours)…i understand stash management from the app might be difficult, but this could be ameliorated by being able to search by star or niche (or both!)